The findings of a recent study indicate that those who received guidance from top performers mistakenly believed that it was more beneficial than usual.

Who would you prefer approach for advice on how to achieve something: a top performer in that field or someone barely squeaking by? Most individuals would go with the best performer. However, the guidance from that person might not be any more useful.

“Skillful performance and skillful teaching are not always the same thing,” says David Levari (Harvard Business School), lead author of a recent Psychological Science article, “so we shouldn’t expect the best performers to necessarily be the best teachers as well.”

He and coauthors Timothy D. Wilson (University of Virginia) and Daniel T. Gilbert (Harvard University) of four investigations discovered that elite performers, at least in some categories, don’t advise better than other performers. They simply offer more of it.

“People seem to mistake quantity for quality,” adds the team. “Our studies suggest that in at least in some instances, people may overvalue advice from top performers.”

Levari and colleagues conducted the first study to examine whether consumers believe an advisor’s performance is a reliable predictor of the quality of their advise.

Through Amazon Mechanical Turk, more than 1,100 participants were recruited, and they were informed that they would be playing a game called Word Scramble and then responding to questions about it. Participants were given 60 seconds to create as many words as they could after being shown a board of letters. Three rounds of play were conducted, each using a different letter board.

The participants were then tasked with selecting which advisors they would prefer to seek guidance from in order to excel at the activity. Regardless of how the question was posed (i.e., in a free-choice or forced-choice format), participants demonstrated a clear preference for the greatest performers.

The second study looked into whether the best performers actually gave the best advise. They asked 100 “advisors” to play six games of Word Scramble, offer guidance to aspiring competitors, and assess how good their own counsel was. The top achievers thought they had provided the best guidance.

Another 2,085 subjects were randomly assigned to either the advise or no-advice condition in the same trial. Participants in the advise condition first played one round of Word Scramble, then received guidance from a random advisor before playing five more games. Six rounds were completed by the individuals who did not receive any advice. After getting advice, advisee performance improved, and this trend continued with each following round. However, on average, the advise from the top performers was no more useful than the advice from the other performers. A similar study was done with darts, and the findings followed a similar pattern.

“In our experiments, people given advice by top performers thought that it helped them more, even though it usually didn’t,” remarks Levari. “Surprisingly, they thought this even though they didn’t know anything about the people who wrote their advice.”

The researchers ran two more tests to determine why superior performers’ guidance appeared to be better. The study’s objectives and hypotheses were hidden from two student research assistants who coded the recommendations for seven characteristics: authority, actionability, articulateness, obviousness, amount of proposals, “should” suggestions, and “should not” suggestions. The perceived usefulness and perceived improvement of each attribute were examined.

Only one factor, the quantity of suggestions, reliably predicted both how helpful and how much better the advise was thought to be. The effectiveness of the advise was not correlated with the quantity of suggestions, though.

“Top performers didn’t write more helpful advice,” adds Levari, “but they did write more of it, and people in our experiments mistook quantity for quality.”

So, why did the advice not work better? Levari and his coworkers have some suggestions.

First, skilled performers may disregard basic counsel because “natural talent and extensive practice have made conscious thought unnecessary.”

“A natural-born slugger who has played baseball every day since childhood,” according to the authors, “may not think to tell a rookie about something they find utterly intuitive, such as balance and grip.”

It’s also possible that great performers lack communication skills. Even when a top performer had explicit knowledge to offer, the researchers noted that they might not be very skilled at doing so. And last, a lot of advise can be more than you can actually apply.

We put in a lot of effort and resources to find reliable sources of guidance, whether they be coworkers, coaches, teachers, tutors, friends, or relatives. Next time you receive advice, you may want to focus less on how much there was and more on how much you can truly apply.

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